KCC history students finding there's time in a bottle

Kellogg Community College students Shelby Childers and Matthew Dowell help sort through some antique glass bottles at Kimball House Museum as part of their Michigan history class.(Photo: Al Lassen/For the Enquirer)

History has always come in all shapes and sizes. Apparently, it also comes in quarts and pints, too.

On a recent Thursday afternoon at the Kimball House Museum, Kellogg Community College students in Ray DeBruler's local Michigan history course also learned that there's more to history than dates and battles and personalities.

So the students, under the watch of Mary Butler of the Battle Creek Historical Society, unloaded hundreds of old bottles, collected from several local families over the decades, in an effort to identify, catalog and decide where to put them and what to do with them.

The bottles, ranging in size from small medicine bottles to quart-sized beer bottles, offer a glimpse back in Battle Creek history when bottles of all types of liquids could be found.

The bottles have been donated to the Historical Society and have not been appraised in years.

They feature eclectic titles such as Indian Herb Bitters and Brown's Celebrated Bitters and Log Cabin Sasparilla and Dr. Girard's London Ginger Brandy and, truly, the bottles came in all sizes, shapes, colors and thickness. Most had no tops but others still had their corks and some had stoppers.

One, from the H.F. Buckler Co. and touting itself as an "electric laxative," still had its liquid inside.

The bottles would have held anything from medicine to whiskey to beer to soda pop.

One student displayed a burgundy-colored, fish-shaped bottle.

Asked what it might have contained back in the day, Butler just smiled and shook her head.

"Beats the hell out of me," she said.

And maybe that's part of the fun.

"I didn't think I'd be going through different types of bottles," said Marshall's Matthew Dowell, a KCC student and a member of DeBruler's class who hopes to one day be a high school history teacher. "But it's been fun. You learn a lot about the little things of history doing this."

Butler said the plan is to wade through the collection and find bottles produced locally for display next year at the Kimball House Museum as part of the 100th anniversary of the historical society. It will also mark the 50th anniversary of the house being turned over to the society as a museum and the 130th anniversary of the house being built.

It's another step by local historians to reconnect the community with Battle Creek's past, which in the 1800s featured everything from threshing machine manufacturers to machine parts to cereal to bottlers of all types of liquids from ice cream flavorings to spirits.

In sorting through the bottles last week, one student found a bottle from the R.W. Snyder Co. of Battle Creek that held something called "spirits and camphors."

And while it was a company that in the early 1900s that called itself a "manufacturer of fine extracts," it ran into legal issues with the federal government when one of its maple-flavored products for desserts was shown to use artificial flavoring, according to a 1914 service and regulatory notice from the Bureau of Chemistry.

These are the kinds of stories, and the kind of history, that thrill people like Butler and DeBruler, who has taught at KCC since since 2002.

For years, KCC history professor Liz Neumeyer took students to sites throughout the area, exposing them to the kind of history that can't be found in books.

When she retired, DeBruler continued the practice.

"It gives students some hands-on with history," he said. "I want the classroom to be a museum. That's the goal. This is work without them realizing it's work."

And part of it is spending time at the Heritage Battle Creek archives sifting through local documents, photos and relics as well as making at least one stop at the Kimball House.

Students receive service learning credits for the class and it benefits those who not only want to teach when they graduate, but those who hope to work in museums one day.

For Dowell, who toured the Kimball House and brought dozens of bottles out of storage to be reviewed, this is the best way to experience history.